Into The Realm

Secret Meadow

Secret Meadow

I stand on our back porch, itself a nautical waste heap of chocks, blocks, buoys, gaffs, and empty nail kegs, and whatever else has washed up on our harbor beach, and pluck my slime knife from its tackle block housing. Slipping the thin blade behind my belt, I step over a more recent culling, a Mercury outboard with a bent prop. I recall the day I carried the engine on my shoulder from the town landing, where it had been abandoned, or so I believed, to our back porch, where it now sits. I did this three years ago and I still don’t know what I’m going to do with it, other than it’s all mine. This addiction to salvage obviously runs in my blood. Spotting a coil of rope lying in the mire, I sling it over my right shoulder, for, as Gramp always warns, “No amount of preparation is uncalled for when sailing into the Realm.”

I exit the back porch by way of the whaler’s gaff. Passing the pagoda tree, I hike through an unkempt field of sunflowers, the bushy blond halos craning in unison toward the early morning sun. Fat bumblebees zip about my head, oblivious to my presence, as I wind my way through the eight-foot stalks in search of the deer run that will bring me to our landing in the Cedar Swamp. Only I can’t find it. I am lost, the spring rains and summer sun having transformed the sparse Cape Cod moraine into a Congolese jungle.

With our landholdings spread over three townships, to this day there are hollows and thickets that I have yet to explore and who knows, behind every tree and rock cropping might be the remnants of an ancient Indian village or a smuggler’s hideaway or, if I’m lucky, a Viking Cromlech jutting from the ground, buried under a bushel of poison ivy.

An army of paratrooping grasshoppers takes wing as I scramble over an ancient stake and rider, and I am on the lookout for lowland gorillas when a ruffed grouse breaks from the heath and sprints down a matted rabbit run. I give chase, making a path an elephant could follow but lose sight of the small bird as it flees over a fieldstone fence. I seem to recall trying to keep my balance on a similar stone wall as a youth, and if memory of a badly sprained ankle serves, the fence eventually peters out onto a secret meadow abloom in Oriental poppies. It was the ancestral women of the family who tended this crop, partaking of the Asiatic herb to get them through the harsh winters and their husbands’ long absences at sea.

I recall the day I came upon a graze of raccoons sprawled about the meadow, lying on their backs and scratching their bellies like a bunch of winos in a hobo jungle. I had my new rifle slung across my shoulders, gifted to me by my father on my tenth birthday. With the rifle came responsibility, my father had told me, only he didn’t elaborate, and I never asked. The coons languished under scarlet bulbs and did not stir at my approach. I was sure these were the same swamp cats who had raided our tomato garden and tipped over our trash bins the night before. Could it be the responsibility my father spoke of meant protecting our crops? Standing in the meadow that day, I had a decision to make.

* * *

Sliding my red Keds over the wet grass, I creep up on a slumbering raccoon. Slipping the rifle’s strap from my right shoulder, I lower the barrel at the coon’s face as it continues smiling blissfully up at the midday sun. c*****g back the hammer, I take a breath, I hold it, then exhale and pull the trigger. The bullet impacts the animal’s right cheek, blowing back its fur. The coon makes a gurgling sound deep in its throat while holding out its childlike hands as if to blot out the sun. I look on in ghastly horror as the coon’s mouth fills with blood, and it begins to choke. Lifting the coon with the toe of my right sneaker, I turn the animal onto its belly, where it dies in a series of raspy gasps. Wiping away hot tears, I push onward through the meadow, reloading my rifle and repeating the process until the whole graze lay dead. Raccoons don’t play possum. Gathering the dead coons, I pile them into a rusted, red wheelbarrow, then slog it through the wood and up the sloping hillside to our back porch, where my father sits in his favorite rattan chair, smoking a cheroot.

“That our suppa’ you bringin’?” he asks, smiling handsomely down at me. I set the barrow next to our splitting stump and saunter up to the back porch aglow with pride.

“Did what you told me. Took aim, held my breath, and shot!”

“Attaboy!” exclaims my father, slapping his knees and hopping from his chair, and he is beside me in a single stride. Wrapping his strong arms around my slender shoulders, he pulls me close. “Remember to clear the chamber?” he asks. I proudly hand him my new rifle. Ratcheting back the action, he eyeballs the empty chamber approvingly and hands it back. Nodding at the barrow, he asks, “Whatcha’ got in there? Tom turkey? Peter Cottontail?”

I shake my head. “Bigger!”

“What’s bigger than a tom?” he asks ponderingly.

“Swamp cats,” I tell him.

“Coons?” he asks, clarifying.

“Yup,” I happily reply. “I got ‘em all!”

“What all you talkin’?” asks my father, his brow sagging slightly.

“The lot.” I beam. “They were lying in the grass like they were asleep or something.”

“Where exactly were you shootin’?” asks my father, his mouth drawing into a frown.

“In a meadow…near where the old fence lets out…had these red bulbs all over.”

My father hurries down the slope. I chase after him. Falling in at his flailing boots, I shout, “Thieves in the night steeling our food! That’s what you and Gramp called them!”

Coming to a stop at our splitting stump, my father reaches into the barrow and takes out a dead raccoon. Examining the pelt, he asks, “All ’em shot up close like this?”

“They wouldn’t run!” I mewl, tears streaming down my cheeks. “Why wouldn’t they run?”

“Kil’t the whole graze by the looks of it,” my father grumbles. “Now how ’em babies spose’ to eat back in their dens?”

“But they stole our tomatoes,” I whimper.

Holding me roughly by my shoulders, my father replies harshly, “’Them coons got a right to live unda’ the same trees we do. So what if a few red-toms go missin’? We can afford it!”

“I thought that’s what you wanted?” I say, openly weeping.

My father’s grip on me softens. Placing me atop the splitting stump, he cups my quivering chin in his strong hand and says to me, “Fishermen take from nature what She gives to him in plentiful supply. We feed the world, Caleb, not just ourselves. It’s wrong what you did.”

Struggling to speak, I say to my father between sniffles, “I only wanted…to be like you.”

“You’re a good boy, Caleb. Never do ya’ have to prove ya’self to me,” says my father. “That’s my job to you. Killin’ don’t make a man. I fill the hold, sure, but I ain’t out there sportfishin’, and if it’s not on my catch list, I throw it back. I figure the more I let live today, the more they’ll be in the future, your future.”

“Are you going to take away my rifle?”

Looking at the 10 gauge leaning against the porch steps, my father considers it for a moment, then turns to me, saying, “Always take what you need, and not what you can take, and I’ll leave it at that.” Nodding at the wheelbarrow, he adds, “The two of us will bury the coons before I leave in the morn.”

“I wish you didn’t have to go,” I reply, pulling at the grass at my feet. “I wish that stupid boat of yours would sink.”

Standing abruptly, my father walks onto the bluff, where he remains for some time, looking out across the bay. With his back to the splitting stump, he finally speaks. “Me being away is hard on you. That I know. Hard on me, more than you realize, but it’s what we do. What we’ve always done. Doesn’t make it right, just makes it so. Reason I keep bringing you ’em books and tellin’ ya’ to pay attention in school is so you’ll have a choice when the ship’s whistle blows.”

“Didn’t mean it,” I say to my father, running the back of my hand across my runny nose. “About your boat sinking.”

Turning to me, my father smiles. Walking back to the splitting stump, he ruffles my shaggy hair with his large hand, saying, “Hell, I know that. Never figured any different.” Lifting me high in the air, he swings me onto his back, and together we gallop down the sloping hillside. Cutting through the sunflower field, my father easily knocks down the sturdy stalks, and I am in the throes of uncontrollable laughter when he runs the length of our harbor beach with my feet sailing from his back like a windsock. Clamoring up the bluff on all fours without breaking stride, he then sprints the two of us up the sloping hillside and throws our pairing onto the back porch, where we disappear into Gramp’s prepared galley. My father never needed no whaler’s gaff!

I awoke early the next morn and ran to my father’s room, where I found his door ajar and his sea chest open. Leaping down the spiral staircase in my PJs, I stepped onto the back porch and ran to where the red wheelbarrow sat empty next to a patch of freshly upturned earth. My father didn’t leave a marker. He didn’t have to. Captain ‘Mad Jack’ Forrest went missing two months later when the fishing boat he captained sank mysteriously somewhere on the Grand Banks. No distress call was sent and there were no survivors. And neither was the boat or any wreckage of it ever found, as if the boat and crew were sucked from the top-water to join Atlantis. I never shot my rifle after that day.

For the rest of that summer, I searched for the raccoon dens, dragging a backpack filled with table scraps down every warren and rabbit run that I came across, then scattering the spoils wherever I believed the dens might be. I never saw a single raccoon during that time, baby or adult. I continued my quest well into the fall, rubbing baking soda on the poison ivy and picking brambles from my clothes and topknot long after the sun went down. Before going to bed each night, I’d place a tomato on my windowsill and lie awake watching it until the Sandman came to call. Crows would usually find the tomato in the early morn and, after punching holes in the skin with their sharp beaks, carry it away, leaving only a scattering of silky black feathers in their wake.

Thanksgiving of that year was a particularly sad one inside the Forrest house. Instead of the usual three plates, there were now only two. Gramp put out a big spread anyway: twenty-pound bird crammed with oyster stuffing, creamed onions with pan-dripped gravy topping lumpy mashed potatoes, along with homemade cranberry sauce with big, juicy cranberries. It felt like we were eating at the table of some Viking king! After supper, I took a plate of leftovers up the spiral staircase and to my room. Holding the plate one-handed, I crawled from my bedroom window and onto a gabled awning. Light snow had begun to fall when I placed the plate under a low-hanging bough.

That night I lay awake thinking of my father and the many lessons he taught me, but more importantly, of the time we spent together fishing the Powder Hole and sailing the inner harbor. But my favorite pastime with him was watching the Chatham Athletics play semipro summer baseball from our perch behind the home run fence. There wasn’t a ball hit that my father couldn’t run down and catch, no matter how far over the home run fence they went. He was good enough in high school that he could have played college ball and who knows, he might have even gone pro. But when the ship’s whistle blew, he was on it, leaving the baseball and hockey scholarships sealed in their envelopes on the kitchen table. Mostly though, he sits on his haunches watching me miss more home run balls than I caught, but always offering encouragement. He never found fault with the obvious, that I wasn’t inclined to team sports, that I wasn’t fast enough or coordinated like he was. That I was born short and stocky, like my mother, and not long-limbed and fleet of foot like he and Gramp.

That night I went to sleep with hot tears in my eyes. It was the first time I cried since my father was officially declared lost at sea. The following morn, I got up and took a bath, then returned to my room to dress for school. I’d forgotten about the plate I left out until I saw the curtains stirring. Going to the window, I expected to see a tangle of beaks and wings fighting over the scraps, but to my wonder, I found the plate licked clean with not a single black feather littering the freshly laid snow. Examining the plate, I noticed a set of humanlike hand prints leading to and away from the plate and onto the low-hanging pine bough. I stared at the plate for longer than I can remember. Crawling onto the awning, I brought the plate inside and placed it under my bed, choosing not to wash it. Returning from school later that afternoon, I loaded the plate with more table scraps and placed it on the same spot under the low-hanging pine bough, only to find the plate again licked clean the following morn. I continued to load the plate through the fall, never quite sure if I was feeding the entire forest or a single dweller.

Christmas of that year brought some cheer back to the Forrest house as one of Gramp’s familiars had a litter. He invited the town elders over along with their grandchildren to pick out a kitten, and as the eggnog flowed, the old stories were told. I was sitting alone in our parlor, staring aimlessly out the frosted windows, when I noticed the many firelit eyes staring back at me from the tree line in eager anticipation. I laughed out loud for the first time in months, causing Gramp to cut short his reminiscing and walk over to me.

“Thought ya’ had some lass stashed up in yar’ room there for a while. Truth is, I been leavin’ a plate out m’self from time to time. ’Em coons will sleep good this winter. Your dad would be proud of ya’, Caleb. Real proud. Now, why don’t ya’ see if ’em thievin’ rascals like sweets.” Patting my arm, Gramp left a platter of Christmas cookies at my elbow before leaving my side to rejoin his pals.

* * *

I reach the end of the fieldstone fence. The sunflowers here are shorter, more spread out, with their wilting blond halos tilted not at the sun but at the ground, seemingly devoid of happiness. I walk onto the gently lolling meadow long ago culled of the scarlet poppies. My ankles are damp with early morning dew as I slink along with my head down and come to the spot where I shot the first raccoon. I take a knee and run my hand over the wet grass, checking for any lingering sign of the crime, but of course, there’s no blood. There wasn’t that much to begin with. Another crime occurred not far from where I’m kneeling, only I consider it more a matter of conscience than I do murder, and though I don’t believe in ghosts, that’s where you’ll find one, roaming the deep woods near the biggest of our three kettle ponds.

I walk to the edge of the meadow and find myself facing a thicket of bearberry and wild rambling rose. A landscape artist’s dream, to be sure, and I am awed by its beauty, but I also know that I must pass through it to get to my boat. Somewhere along the way I took a wrong turn. But to retrace my steps now would take precious time away from my planned day on the water, so I continue into the bramble, carefully picking my way past the thorny stems.